


what is left behind

by SnowStormSkies



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Aftermath, Canonical Character Death, Challenge Response, Kaiju, Resolution, dismantling the shatterdomes, h/c postage stamp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-28
Updated: 2014-02-28
Packaged: 2018-01-14 03:07:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1250428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnowStormSkies/pseuds/SnowStormSkies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Russians make flowers for their dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what is left behind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hexenhasel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hexenhasel/gifts).



> Filled for hurt comfort feburary challenged - I had _shipwrecked, waterboarding, planetary destruction, wildcard._. All credit goes to Casey, the beta. And the whip cracker.

The Russians build flowers for their dead.

After the tides recede, the joy fades, the relief is swept away for death and memorial services, the Russians are left to mourn.

And they build flowers for their dead.

There are no flowers in the Shatterdome. There are no fragile blooms, no delicate grasses, no tall trees standing through the wind, the rain and the snow that such living things faced in Russia.

But if there are no gentle green stems and colourful petals and soft leaves to be found, then they will make them.

They will build flowers.

Sasha started it - a flower made out of twisted paperclips in the halls of Vladivostok before her first Drift with Alexis, all those years, and people, and deaths, and victories, and the one single loss ago.

It was the strongest, the best, the most difficult Drift she had ever done - that anyone had ever done - but just like she bent and remade those thin metal strips, she bent and remade her own mind to make it fit, to give Alexis balance and calm.

He was young; he was new to the Drift, and he wanted to chase the RABIT because that’s what they all did, but Sasha’s flower focused them both.

Sasha built the first flower that started their career in Cherno Alpha.

But Alexis built the second out of gold chains and diamond studded rings on her dresser when she invited him over for contraband vodka and a lesson in how not to chase the RABIT.

He remembered, and so did she, the next time they were in the Drift, skating along memories of each other from both perspectives, catching them and letting them go in the same moment. She remembered the way his rings stacked around hers to make the center whorl of the golden sunflower, and his chain coiled around hers to make the stem and leaves.

And so it went on.

Cherno Alpha was built out of Mother Earth, like Sasha and Alexis were built out of Mother Russia. Cherno Alpha was iron and steel and wiring and bolts holding together a giant. Their giant.

But Cherno Alpha is no longer built out just Mother Earth - the sea is reclaiming the steel, the iron, the bodies within, corroding and tarnishing, and leaving no place untouched.

The Kaiju bodies are raised on aircraft carriers, shipped to shore to be cut up, frozen, suspended in jars and held up as trophies of a war that nobody thought they would win.

The last remaining Jaegar, Crimson Typhoon, is raised by the Chinese Government, and returned to Bejing. Although it is not where the triplets came from, not their birth city, Crimson Typhoon stands as a testament to Chinese engineering, to man’s control and design potential. And so it stands, head rebuilt but empty of the three who once made it dance, on the edge of the city.

It will not rust. It will not decay. It will always be new, and unbroken.

But nothing grows around it either. No flowers bloom in its shadow.

On the ocean floor, cradled between a centuries long extinct volcano, and a lava field, Cherno Alpha lies, a monument to nobody except those within it. Inside a broken, battered cockpit, the wreck of a chest that was never intended to be seaworthy, the life support systems are fractured, cracked, and destroyed, but the burst of flame from the reactor pit never reached it.

Inside, two suits drift in the waves, still reaching for the creature that forced them down below, into the black waters, into the quiet of the sea’s cold depths.

It was not quick.

It was not intended to be.

But just as life existed and was taken by the sea, life that did not exist is now created by it, too. Corals bloom in the wake of the sea’s cold fingers, puffs of pink and grey and white, yellows, and blacks, and they are not flowers, but they are close enough.

And on land, Cherno Alpha’s crew, the ones left behind, build flowers out of what they have - wood, plastic, metal, and paper, and they lay them in the berth where their giant once stood.

The flowers are carved into old bunk boards stolen from the emptying dorms of the Shatterdome, old steel plates meant to repair behemoths that no longer exist, twisted and charred out of paperwork that will never be filed because there is no need for requisition orders for an army that’s being disbanded.

In a corner of the hanger, where once an old boom box sat to blast out Ukrainian Hardhouse, a carpet of flowers blooms in grey, and brown, and black, and silvery white.

Giants falls, and so do the people inside of them.

But the Russians build their flowers in the confines of the hanger, and deep beneath the ocean, Cherno Alpha and her pilots slowly disappear as the sea blooms too.


End file.
